Blogs / The Loom

My publisher has been sending out copies of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution to some leading biologists for possible endorsements when it comes out in October. Here’s what we’re hearing back so far…

“The Tangled Bank is the best written and best illustrated introduction to evolution of the Darwin centennial decade, and also the most conversant with ongoing research. It is excellent for students, the general public, and even other biologists.” –Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University, author of Consilience

“Carl Zimmer’s excursion through the evolutionary epic is without equal.  His gift for the scientific narrative is on full display through The Tangled Bank, and he leads his readers onward with an energy and delight that never disappoints. This marvelous text is an extraordinary introduction to the depth and richness of evolutionary science.” –Kenneth Miller, Brown University, author of Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul and co-author of Miller & Levine’s Biology

“Zimmer has produced a wonderfully thorough introduction to evolutionary biology. With his prose and color diagrams by leading artists produced specially for this volume, The Tangled Bank will be a powerful tool to introduce students to the explanatory power of evolution and the way that it integrates different fields of knowledge. I have no doubt that this important volume will find its way into diverse courses in the curriculum.” –Neil Shubin, University of Chicago, author of Your Inner Fish

“One rarely says of a textbook, ‘I couldn’t put it down,’ but that was how I felt reading Carl Zimmer’s Tangled Bank. Zimmer has applied his award-winning communication skills to producing a readable yet up-to-date and thorough treatment of evolutionary biology. Were I teaching evolution, this is the book I would use.” — Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center For Science Education and winner of the 2009 Stephen Jay Gould Prize

“Carl Zimmer’s The Tangled Bank is a joy to read. He draws readers into the excitement of the rapidly expanding science of evolutionary biology, as he explains why life on earth is so diverse and how the web of life evolved to be so entangled.  He explains, through elegant prose and beautiful illustrations, the remarkable progress that has been made in recent years in understanding the evolutionary process.” –John Thompson, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution

“This engagingly written and well-organized book is a wonderful introduction to evolutionary biology.  It beautifully synthesizes the conceptual basis of evolutionary theory with the empirical evidence that evolution has occurred.  The book is remarkably up-to-date, seamlessly moving from discussion of fossils to genomes, and nicely illustrates that evolutionary biology is a vigorous field that increasingly takes an experimental approach.” — Jonathan Losos, Harvard University

To all of these biologists, many thanks from this old English major.

(And, by the way, that is the final cover. Thanks to the 1018 people who cast votes on their favorite mock-ups, as well as to the many who didn’t like any of them and asked, “Where’s the tangled bank?”  You spoke, I listened. In the end, I decided to go with Tiktaalik, but give it some extra company–both animal and vegetable–based on fossils that also date back to this sort of ecosystem 370 million years ago. Thanks to Carl Buell, as ever, for making that idea into a cover.)

I will be on the public radio show The Takeaway at 720 am EST Tuesday to talk about fireflies. I’ll update this post with a link to the podcast when it’s online. [And here it is.]

Fireflies are the topic of my story on the cover of the New York Times science section tomorrow. It’s the result of a visit I paid last Friday evening to a meadow in Massachusetts, where I listened to Sara Lewis of Tufts University explain the sultry, complex tale of sex, deception, and death that was playing out in front of me.

I first got to know Lewis’s work last summer, when I decided I wanted to include fireflies in my next book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Lewis co-authored a fascinating review of firefly biology last year (free pdf from Lewis’s web site). I particularly liked this chart, which shows how different species have evolved different flash signals.

The male, flying around, releases a certain pattern of flashes–a single one second pulse followed by a five secondin the case of Photinus pyralis, for one example. And if a female P. pyralis, sitting on a blade of grass, likes what she sees, she responds three seconds later. Not one. Not six. Three. If she responds at the right interval, he knows he’s found a female of his own species and zeroes in, sending more flashes. She may also be signalling other males at the same time; which male she chooses may come down to subtle features of the flash pattern–for example, a rapid series of pulses as opposed to a slow one.

You can, as I discovered, speak their language with a penlight. You can even play the male or the female, depending on your mood.

There’s lots of strange business going on out among the fireflies. I didn’t have room in the article to describe some of Lewis’s new areas of research. Because female fireflies mate with several males, they can end up with sperm from several males inside them at once. Studies on other animals have suggested that females can choose which male’s sperm they’ll use to fertilize their eggs. Males can also inject chemicals with their sperm that increase their odds of fertilization. It’s clear that in many species, female preferences and male competition can continue after mating ends.

No one knows how this struggle plays out in fireflies. Adam South, one of Dr. Lewis’s graduate students, is investigating this side of the evolutionary equation. He is mating female fireflies with two males apiece and then collecting the eggs they lay. Using DNA tests, he’s determining the paternity of the eggs. Perhaps the males with more attractive flashes have more offspring.

What scientists like Lewis know about fireflies is remarkable, but it’s dwarfed by what they don’t know. Are fireflies on the decline, for example? Unfortunately, there’s no good long-term data. But that’s now an opportunity for some citizen-science you can get involved in. Lewis and some former students have helped organize Firefly Watch, based at the Boston Museum of Science. You can make your backyard part of biology’s new frontier.

As a science writer, I often find it sobering to read scientific history. Science works slowly, even though we wish it would work in nanosecond breakthroughs.

In 1913, for example, a Russian scientist named Nikolai Anichkov ran an experiment in which he had egg yolks fed to rabbits. On this cholesterol-heavy diet the rabbits developed atherosclerosis. The more cholesterol the rabbits ate, the bigger the deposits on their blood vessels became. It was a tremendous discovery, considered by some one of the greatest in medical history.

But it did not lead overnight to a treatment for heart disease. In fact, it did not even lead, on its own, to a clear understanding of how cholesterol ends up in the blood vessels. Instead, it focused the attention of later scientists on the question of cholesterol. It took many years for scientists to figure out the steps by which enzymes produce cholesterol molecules. Then scientists began searching for drugs that might interfere with those enzymes.

In 1971, six decades after Anichkov ran his egg-yolk experiments, Akira Endo of Tokyo Noko University and his colleagues, decided to see if microbes made natural cholesterol-fighting compounds (free pdf). They reasoned that such a compound would be a potent weapon against microbial competitors, since cholesterol and related molecules are essential for building cells. In 1973 they found a fungus that blocks a key enzyme in the cholesterol pathway. It took more than another decade before drugs based on Endo’s explorations, known as statins, reached the market. Today drugs like Lipitor are prescribed to millions of people.

If a journalist wrote an article on Anchikov’s intial research, the most accurate headline would have been something like: “RUSSIAN SCIENTIST DISCOVERS LINK BETWEEN MOLECULE AND HEART DISEASE. WILL LEAD TO POWERFUL NEW MEDICINE IN EIGHTY YEARS.”

Of course, it would be a rare journalist who would be able to see eighty years in the future like that. And headlines about events readers won’t be alive to see can seem awfully remote. Anchikov’s discovery did not change the lives of the people who could have read about it at the time. Their grandchildren, yes.

I’ve been thinking about Anchikov recently, after having read a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. It’s by Joel Hirschhorn of Harvard, on the subject of genomes.

A decade ago a complete sequence of the human genome was still a dream, although a dream close to becoming real. In a typical article from 1999, a reporter wrote that “scientists hope to treat diseases in much the same way that software engineers fix faulty computer programs, by isolating flaws in the code.” Once we could read the entire human genome, the article promised, nothing would be the same: “By identifying the genetic roots of illnesses like cancer and heart disease, some experts say, the science of the genome, or genomics, may make it possible for a child born today to live to 150–or, some say, much longer.”

What a difference a decade makes. Scientists have been finding many genetic markers for common diseases like heart disease and diabetes, but they’re not pointing the way to obvious treatments. The falling cost of DNA is letting scientists sequence genomes left and right–not just people’s genomes, but the genomes of their cancer cells and their microbes. And for now, scientists are drowning in data rather than plucking out new cures.

Hirschhorn wants the growing number of skeptics to keep history in mind. In his NEJM letter he writes,

New biologic insights do not guarantee a rapid translation into clinical practice; the latter will require great effort by basic, translational, and clinical researchers. The difficulty in translation is not unique to genetic discoveries: nearly a century and three Nobel Prizes separate the determination of the chemical composition of cholesterol from the development of statins. Each discovery of a biologically relevant locus is a potential first step in a translational journey, and some journeys will be shorter than others. With a more complete collection of relevant genes and pathways, we can hope to shorten the interval between biologic knowledge and improved patient care. 

In the next issue of Newsweek, I consider the near-term and the long-term future of genomes. My essay is called “The Gene Puzzle.” Check it out.

[Animation: Wikipedia]

Over at the Origins blog on Science’s web site, I take a look at what means to have sex–especially if you happen to be bacteria. Check it out.

Congratulations are in order to the writers who are now finalists for the Royal Society Science Book Prize:

What the nose knows: The science of scent in everyday life by Avery Gilbert

Bad science by Ben Goldacre

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science by Richard Holmes

Decoding the heavens: Solving the mystery of the world’s first computer by Jo Marchant

The drunkard’s walk: How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Your inner fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin

Also, as I mentioned earlier, Three Quarks Daily has established a prize for the best science blog post, judged by linguist Steven Pinker. Congratulations to the winners, including Discover’s own Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.

Last month, I asked you how to handle the ever-growing pile of science books I receive (before I donate most of them to the library, of course). A plurality of you voted in favor of frequent thumbnail descriptions, rather than alternatives like the less frequent all-out review. That’s a relief, because that was my own preference. So let me pull off the top book from the pile,  Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane.

The reason it’s on the top is that it happened to be very useful to me right now with an article I’m working on (more on that next month). Lane has selected a handful of key features of the natural world, from DNA to sex to warm-bloodedness to consciousness, and has written a chapter about each, explaining what we understand about it and how it evolved. The list is, as Lane himself admits, a bit arbitrary, and on first inspection it may give off a whiff of Scala Naturae, arranging life on a ladder from lower to higher. But once you delve into Lane’s writing, those minor qualms will evaporate. Lane, the author of two previous books about biology, writes about tricky topics like the chemistry of photosynthesis with grace and ease. On the topics I’m familiar with, I can vouch that he has picked good studies to showcase. Lane is also a scientist himself, and he not only reports on the latest research on each topic but also sometimes steps in with intriguing ideas of his own.

As with future posts of this ilk, this is not a full-blown book review. Call it a book (p)review: a heads-up about a book that has grabbed my attention. While I started reading Life Ascending for work, I look forward to finishing it for my own enjoyment.

Yet more totally weird examples of parasites manipulating their hosts. Viruses make aphids sprout wings. Bacteria keep spiders from making silken balloons to float away from home. All the details are at Mystery Rays From Outer Space.

Cheri writes, “I am a huge fan of yours.  I also want to share my new science tattoo, which I got because I am a biotechnologist and wanted to show my love of science….The blue atomic symbol is for science; the black biotech is for, well, biotech; and the flower is my home state’s flower, the Alaskan forget-me-not which also symbolizes life.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

I just loved this speech John Hodgman made at the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner yesterday. Hodgman spoke for all us nerds, perhaps even including the president himself. And best of all, while talking about that fine nerd novel Dune, he showed the president a painting of a giant sand worm from Dune by John Schoenherr. (It shows up at 11:20.)

I grew up a couple miles from Schoenherr and spent much of my nerdy youth with his son Ian, hanging out in his fabulous old barn-slash-studio, filled with his classic science fiction art, new paintings of bears and geese, assorted Japanese swords, many cameras, a complete collection of National Geographic, and lots of bones and stuffed animal heads. I’m grateful to Hodgman for bringing back  those times, and for showing off the work of a wonderful artist. I return Hodgman the final words of his speech: I extend that most American of greetings–I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper.

I’m delighted to report that I’ve been appointed the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. I’ve felt like an informal visiting scholar there for a while now, having given talks and spoken with classes of journalism students a number of times. But I was particularly impressed on a recent visit when I could see how they’re grappling head-on with the changing nature of journalism. Nobody gets out of there without knowing how to shoot and edit video, for example. So while I’ll be offering my thoughts on how to thrive (not just survive) in science journalism in years to come, I’m hoping to learn a few new tricks myself.

[Image: Wikipedia]

The Kyoto Prize has gone to Peter and Rosemary Grant, I see from 80 Beats. Congratulations to them both for this Nobel-esque honor. If you don’t immediately recognize their names, you can start with this post I wrote last fall about the Grants’ research on the evolution of Darwin’s Finches, and then finish up with a couple books: their own How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin’s Finches and the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner.